by CIO Staff

Matsushita Plans World’s Biggest Plasma Display Plant

News
Jan 11, 20072 mins
Consumer Electronics

Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic) will establish a new plasma display panel (PDP) manufacturing facility in Japan, with a production capacity of 1 million 42-inch panels per month.

The plant, which is scheduled to start operations in Amagasaki, Japan, by May 2009, is the fifth plasma display panel manufacturing facility to be set up by Matsushita PDP Company (MPDP), Matsushita’s joint venture with chemicals group Toray Industries.

The new plant will involve an investment of about 280 billion yen (US$ 2.3 billion), and the construction is scheduled to start in November this year, Panasonic said Thursday. It added that the new factory will be the largest PDP facility in the world.

Matsushita is expanding its PDP production, as it expects that the global market for these displays will grow to 30 million units in 2010 because of the superiority of plasma TVs to other flat-panel TVs in terms of production and cost efficiency, as well as picture quality, the company said.

The company expects that with the global digitalization of TV broadcasts, 65 percent of the 200 million global demand for TVs in 2010 will be for flat-panel TVs. The company has also forecasted that more than 30 percent of the demand in 2010 will be for 37-inch or larger flat-panel TVs.

-John Ribeiro, IDG News Service (Bangalore Bureau)

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